On Saturday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development hosted a Christian worship session on the National Mall featuring a proselytizing extremist and failed politician who’s called for right-wing Christians to control the government.
The event on Saturday was intended to showcase the department’s policy of prioritizing faith groups in its disaster recovery plans. It’s the latest example of the Trump administration using public spaces to host religious events that feature Christian nationalists who believe in destroying the constitutional separation of church and state — a priority the president has openly promoted.
After posting that the Trump administration was “bringing faith back” to Washington, D.C., HUD Secretary Scott Turner posted images of Saturday’s event featuring himself and failed California congressional candidate Sean Feucht. “Faith is back in our Nation’s Capital,” Turner posted.
I wrote about Feucht, a self-described Christian nationalist, in March, when he was invited by HUD to survey wildfire damage in Los Angeles County and claimed he was being tapped by the government to advise on rebuilding.
Feucht has extensive ties to far-right extremists, has claimed that Christians should be “the only ones” in government and that “biblical moral law” should be the basis for American lawmaking. He also wrote in a 2022 blog post that liberal policies like abortion and same-sex marriage are “demonic schemes.”
It’s disturbing — and quite hypocritical — that the federal government should platform such a figure. Imagine conservatives’ conniption if another administration were to promote a state-sanctioned prayer session on the National Mall featuring an Islamic extremist who’d called for Muslim-only governance and the imposition of sharia law nationwide.
HUD’s event on Saturday was fundamentally no different, only with conservative Christian extremists rather than a conservative Muslim — and yet we’ve heard nary a peep of opposition from the MAGA faithful.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
